Git bundles are a great way to keep an offline repository in sync, a situation that arises if you ever need to work in a secure environment. That standard pattern for working this way is to fetch the contents of the bundle into one or more references (one per branch in the bundle) and then configure working branches to track those refs, as if they were remote references. This way the the working branches can pull from the bundle, and 'git status' will show a useful summary of the working branch relative to the most currently fetched bundle.

Leaving aside for now the question of jgit/egit support for bundles, some of this works in egit and some of it doesn't. Specifically, once I fetch the contents of a bundle with Git and manually configure a tracking branch, the egit 'pull' operation works as expected. But the up-arrow/down-arrow decorations don't work in this setting. Similarly, setting up tracking for these branches in egit doesn't work.

Most likely the problem is that egit is incorrectly assuming that the tracked branch must be a remote reference, even though Git does not require that to be true.

How hard would it be to get the decorations and tracking setup working in this context?

As a followup, how hard would it be support bundle create and bundle fetch?